Word: solarized
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...have created a high-performance car whose tail pipe emits nothing but water vapor. In a giant wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, engineers are set to analyze air turbulence in order to make superefficient wind-power turbines. In Japan scientists are perfecting paper-thin solar cells that will be cheap to produce and could turn every house into its own electricity supplier. These ventures, along with many others, are beginning to draw the outlines of a world in which energy use keeps rising and, though fossil fuels remain an important power source, CO2 levels...
...annual Earthfest, a concert and food festival whose power will be completely supplied through renewable resources. Nearby Springfield is hosting their 10th annual Earth Day Clean Up. Manchester, New Hampshire is to host a "One World, One People" Earth Day festival, complete with guest speakers, exhibits, and a solar-powered sound system. Even that dreadful outer-city ghetto, New Haven, Connecticut has devoted this past week to promoting awareness of the environment through the arts and sciences...
...elsewhere. This Columbian path has served us so well before, and nature's products do tend to outshine our own poor workmanship by manifesting things undreamed of in all our philosophy. So let us seek nature's own replicate--on Mars or a few other potential places in our solar system, if we really luck out (and are willing to content ourselves with simple things at bacterial grade and unfit for mutual conversation); or elsewhere, despite daunting distances (beyond any possibility for two-way conversation during human lifetimes) but promising--in the most exciting and improbable long shot...
...answer is probably yes, but it will take a long time. Maybe 500 years. If you ask whether any human being will travel to the stars within the 21st century, the answer is certainly no. The difference between traveling to the nearest star and traveling around our own solar system is about the same as the difference between swimming across the Atlantic and swimming across the Potomac. To get across the Atlantic you need to have a boat or an aircraft. To get to the nearest star you need to have a spacecraft that we have no hope of building...
...scoot around the solar system and return within a few years, you need a spacecraft that will cruise at 100 miles a second. At that speed you will get to Mars in 10 days, to Pluto in 16 months. We can imagine a spacecraft carrying a big area of thin film to collect solar energy, with an ion-jet engine to produce thrust powerful enough to boost a spacecraft to a speed of 100 miles a second. It is also possible to build a nuclear-powered jet to do the same job, if the political objections to nuclear spacecraft...